Piano Sonata No.4 in C minor Op 29 (1917)

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Piano Sonata No.4 in C minor Op 29 (1917)

Allegro molto sostenuto

Andante assai

Allegro con brio, ma non leggiero

Never a composer to waste useful material, Prokofiev based his Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas – both of them frankly subtitled “from old notebooks” – on pieces originally conceived nine or ten years earlier. Written in 1917 in the spa resort of Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, far from the events of the October Revolution, they had to wait for their first performance until the spring of 1918, when it was safe for the composer to return to St Petersburg (or Petrograd as it then was). He did not stay long, however: a month later he left Russia, by a necessarily laborious round-about route, for the United States.

It has been suggested that the character of the Fourth Piano Sonata was influenced by Prokofiev’s reaction to the suicide of a close friend, the pianist Maksimilian Shmitgoff, to whose memory (like the Second Piano Sonata and the Second Piano Concerto) the work is dedicated. In fact, Schmitgoff had died as long as four years earlier and the material the score is based on dates from five or six years before that. If Shmitgoff was in the composer’s mind as he wrote the Sonata in C minor – and its themes do in fact derive from the time the two students first got to know each other at the St Petersburg Conservatoire – his memory can have had little more than a marginal influence.

Anyway, it is surely not as sombre a work as these speculations imply. It is true that it begins in the dark, near the bottom of the piano in C minor, and that it adopts a serious melodic profile that might almost be mistaken for Rachmaninov. But the other two main themes are brighter in colour and, although it is a hard struggle, they sustain their presence in a development dedicated for the most part to combining the various melodic strands in heroically ambitious contrapuntal textures. However, after a prolonged recapitulation of the third theme in C major, the mood of the first theme prevails and the movements ends with C minor chords all the more emphatically grim for the tritone incorporated in them.

The A minor Andante assai derives not from a piano piece but from a discarded student symphony. While the opening might have been more effectively scored for orchestra, with the heavy left-hand chords on lower brass perhaps and the melodic line rising from the depths of the cello section, the subsequent variations on that theme are most effectively, if sometimes a little awkwardly, written for piano. The effortless four-part counterpoint of the idyllic middle section is surely no less attractively presented in keyboard terms than it would have been in the woodwind colours it seems to have been designed for. Towards the end of the movement, the recall of the woodwind theme high in the right hand over the cello melody low in the left, each with its own accompaniment, is masterfully done.

Whatever the inspiration of the first two movements, the last can scarcely be classified as a memorial, even to the best and most understanding of friends. Beginning with a virtuoso flourish in C major and ending (more or less) in the same key, it is a frankly and unapologetically cheerful rondo. The second episode, which forms a graceful and comparatively quiet middle section, does not so much offset the exuberance of the material on either side as stimulate an urge not only to restore the impetus but also to transcend it.